The Metaphysics of Gender

Charlotte Witt

Description

The Metaphysics of Gender is a book about gender essentialism: What it is and why it might be true. It opens with the question: What is gender essentialism? The first chapter distinguishes between essentialism about kinds of individuals (e.g. women and men as groups) and essentialism about individuals (e.g. you and me). Successive chapters introduce the ingredients for a theory of gender essentialism about individuals, called uniessentialism. Gender uniessentialism claims that a social individual's gender is uniessential to that individual. It is modeled on Aristotle's essentialism in which the form or essence of an individual is the principle of unity of that individual. For example, the form or essence of an artifact, like a house, is what unifies the material parts of the house into a new individual (over and above a sum of parts). Since an individual's gender is a social role (or set of social norms), the kind of unity in question is not the unity of material parts, as it is in the artifact example. Instead, the central claim of gender uniessentialism is that an individual's gender provides that individual with a principle of normative unity-a principle that orders and organizes all of that individual's other social roles. An important ingredient in gender uniessentialism concerns exactly which individuals are at issue-human organisms, persons, or social individuals? The Metaphysics of Gender argues that a social individual's gender is uniessential to it. Gender uniessentialism expresses the centrality of gender in our lived experiences and explores the social normativity of gender in a way that is useful for feminist theory and politics.

The Metaphysics of Gender

Charlotte Witt

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsPreface: Why Gender Essentialism1. Two Notions of Essence2. Gender and Social Normativity3. Human Organisms, Social Individuals and Persons4. The Argument for Gender Essentialism5. The Person, the Social Individual and the SelfEpilogue: Gender Essentialism and Feminist PoliticsSelect Bibliography

The Metaphysics of Gender

Charlotte Witt

Author Information

Charlotte Witt is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle and Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics. She is also the editor of Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, and the co-editor of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. She lives in Portland, Maine with her family.

The Metaphysics of Gender

Charlotte Witt

Reviews and Awards

"The book is extremely systematic and original. Witt brings to the discussion a solid background in metaphysics and Aristotelian ethics that informs her view. Drawing on this she is able to construct a very substantial and intricate argument for her conclusion... Moreover her view is utterly unique. It introduces a novel idea of the social subject and a twist on the idea of essentialism to get a genuinely interesting and provocative conclusion. Witt explains complex metaphysical concepts in a way that is understandable and employs them artfully. The book relies on good clear examples at important points and will engage a broad readership."--Sally Haslanger, MIT

"Charlotte Witt has published a bold new book on the metaphysics of our social world, in which she argues for gender essentialism...Her book is a sustained argument for a precise thesis that weaves together issues in feminist theory, metaphysics, moral psychology, ethics, and political philosophy. There are not many works that achieve this. Witt's book is a very important contribution to our understanding of the metaphysics of social reality and of sexist oppression."--Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews